Predicting Job Embeddedness in Healthcare Settings
This study examined the predictive roles of abusive supervision and work-family conflict on job embeddedness among healthcare workers in Owerri, Imo State. Job embeddedness, which reflects employees' links, fit, and sacrifice within their organisational and community environments, plays a vital role in employee retention. The study purposively sampled 157 healthcare workers from the Federal University Teaching Hospital and Charis Multispecialist Hospital, both in Owerri, using validated scales to measure abusive supervision (Tapper, 2000), work-family conflict (Netemeyer et al., 1996) and job embeddedness (Mitchell et al., 2001). Hierarchical regression analyses were employed for data analyses. The results indicate that abusive supervision significantly predicts overall job embeddedness (β = -.603, p < .001), explaining 39.4% of the variance in job embeddedness (R² = .394). Abusive supervision also negatively predicts the fit (β = -.543, p < .001), links (β = -.357, p < .001), and sacrifice (β = -.464, p < .001) dimensions of job embeddedness. In contrast, work-family conflict does not significantly predict overall job embeddedness (β = -.055, p = .431) when abusive supervision is considered. However, work-family conflict positively predicts the links dimension (β = .348, p < .001) but negatively impacts the sacrifice dimension (β = -.433, p < .001). The study recommends that healthcare organisations prioritise addressing abusive supervision to improve employee retention. Additionally, policies promoting work-life balance could also be encouraged to reduce work-family conflict and enhance employees' embeddedness. If applied, these could increase the retention of skilled professionals in the healthcare sector.